Katy Perry and The Rock Close Out the Season on SNL

“Queens is hot right now.” This was the verdict from a dressed-up friend late on Saturday night at the Monster, a West Village piano bar popular for its drag shows, across the street from The Stonewall Inn. (She wasn’t talking about Astoria.) At Monster—a first stop on the way home from watching the season finale of Saturday Night Live—there was no one in drag to be found. It wasn’t a show night. That said, it’s possible that Katy Perry had absconded with the majority of the female impersonator talent in town for her first of two SNL performances, which saw bleachers full of drag queens doing a RuPaul’s Drag Race-style runway walk-off to Perry’s new single, “Swish Swish,” from her forthcoming album Witness.

It was a notable performance (and not just because of those pesky, almost confirmed, rumors of Taylor Swift providing lyrical inspiration for the track, which Perry has described as an “anthem” for those attempting to avoid negative energy).

The song’s rhythm emanates from a ’90s house beat, not dissimilar from what Kanye West did with “Fade” almost a year ago. The arousal is clear: This music, these beats, come from gay, mostly black, ’80s and early ’90s scenes in Chicago, Detroit, and New York. These are tribes that Perry has little to no claim to. She is hardly the first artist to glob onto a culture not her own, and as SNL pointed out in last week’s sketch wherein the tough guys of an auto body shop were obsessed with Drag Race, that scene is by now pop. Still, there will be talk of misappropriation (a Citibank ad featuring the same song arrived immediately at the next commercial break), tokenism, and theft. But those arguments will be quieted (remember when people were mad that Miley rapped?), if not silenced, proportionally to the success of Perry’s new album, which is, after all, not just an album.

Artists don’t release records anymore, not in a traditional sense. Their presentation is more emphatically holistic—we’re buying the artist more than any physical disc, which we’re not buying at all, BTW—hence the importance of a performance such as this. (Because what’s a live performance without a nod to the Internet, Perry closed out the performance with a shimmying appearance from Instagram star Russell Got Barzz.)

The same is to be said for her subsequent piece, which she performed alongside Migos in a reprisal of her Temple of Dendur-shaking Met gala performance: an on-the-nose revelation of “Bon Appétit,” wherein she writhed, stretched and then danced on a Last Supper table, bordered by countless fruits and people of color, including her collaborators. The message was so abundantly clear you could have picked it up on the banana the pop star used as a phone in her final pose: This is Katy Perry’s new direction.

Perry closed out an important season for Saturday Night Live: Not only is it the show’s most successful in 23 years (if you want to feel old, the ’94 cast included Mike Myers, David Spade, and Adam Sandler, and featured Sarah Silverman and Al Franken), the latter part returned the show to a position of political relevance it has not experienced since perhaps Dana Carvey’s early ’90s George Bush imitations. We’re talking, of course, about the Trump White House and Alec Baldwin’s signature, smush-faced send up as well of those of the administration’s key players, including Melissa McCarthy’s Sean Spicer, Jimmy Fallon’s Jared Kushner, and Kate McKinnon’s Kellyanne Conway.

To wit, for the cold open—harkening back to Kate McKinnon’s heartbreaking rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” which she performed as Hillary Clinton just after the rock legend’s death and that candidate’s loss—the entire “Trump Team” assembled on the stage, including complicit Ivanka, played by Scarlett Johansson, to play us a song.

This was a high point for comedy in the episode. Other bright spots included Weekend Update, wherein Colin Jost and Michael Che spent a good deal of their allotted time ripping on the administration, before handing the floor to Vanessa Bayer and her newish character, nervous weather girl Dawn Lazarus.

Next up was Drunk Uncle, played by Bobby Moynihan, who along with Bayer recently announced he was leaving the show, which saluted and celebrated them in turn by using the two castmembers in most of the sketches from the finale.

As for Mr. Johnson, his best live sketch was his first bid, a send up of a recording of WWE promos where his character used personal information—like the fact that his opponent has low sperm count—to deflate Bobby Moynihan’s wrestler, Trashyard Mutt:

But some of the funniest bits came from prerecorded video. The show used the recent fascination with fidget toys—pushing a fictional Cartier hand spinner—as a pretext to go after a certain type of trend-obsessed woman, with a note-perfect portrayal by Bayer. Additionally there was commercial for an illegal male enhancement drug called “Xentrex,” which The Rock slayed.

Another solid prerecorded bit featured a rap video with too many guests, including the return of a favorite character of Mr. Hanks’s.

The host’s other strongest live moments, after the monologue, arrived in two sketches where he essentially played a straight man. The first involved him at a bar, hoping to hook up with women, “helped” by his wingman, Beck Bennett’s bartender, whose understanding of “hook up” is decidedly different. The second evoked a presentation wherein mad scientists (of the super villain variety) presented their newest inventions. The Rock’s matter-of-factly presented child-molesting robot “won” the day by scandalizing the rest of the contestants:

Johnson played the greaser boyfriend to Cecily Strong’s comically inelegant (“I’m Bit-ish!”) British girlfriend. She coddled a terrified looking baby pig onto a Jurassic Park water ride at a theme park where the remarkably reasonable Vanessa Bayer was repeatedly soaked. It was silly, but genuinely amusing, as opposed to some of the other sketches, which rested on the premise of a superhero designing his own costume, or fart jokes.

The finale was not an exceptionally strong goodbye to a remarkable year, but it wasn’t feeble either. Katy Perry’s performance will be discussed, and The Rock handled himself with his signature charm. For better or for worse, we have a good four months before Saturday Night Live is back on the air. While we have The Daily Show, John Oliver, Samantha Bee, and Colbert to tide us over, it’s not unreasonable to say the weekly series remains a reliable exhumation of the horrors and annoyances of contemporary culture. It’s a catharsis, and we’ll miss it. Moreover, unlike so many of the seasons that came before, we really need it.